Knowledge Blog

Welcome to Knowledge Blog. We are investigating a new, light-weight way of publishing scientific, academic and technical knowledge on the web. We have used Knowledge Blog in a number of different ways: hosting tutorials on ontologies and bioinformatics; as a conference website; and as a mechanism for documenting Knowledge Blog.

We also provide software for extending WordPress, enabling referencing, adding metadata to posts, and supporting mathematics on the web. Together, these pieces of software have had many thousands of downloads, representing 100s of installations; it can be used to provide a formal personal publication framework for the researcher.

Finally, we provide Greycite, a service which provides bibliographic metadata for any website, supporting our referencing plugin, and helping authors to link to the many web archiving services, enabling increased digital preservation.

The Problem

Scientific and academic publishing is a painful process for authors, reviewers and readers alike. No one really benefits from the current system which grew because of the expense of producing, printing and distributing books. The internet and the web technologies have changed this enormously, but still the uptake within scientific and academic publishing has been slow, and left much of the existing system in place; the reason for this is that some parts of the system are good: explicit authorship, peer-review and the ability to archive are the main ones.

We need a new solution, that removes the annoyances of the current system, while keeping the advantages.

The Solution

The solution is already available; we just need to use it in a different way. Blogs and blog technology has been designed to allow people to discuss, share and disseminate their opinion in a simple and light-weight way. With a few extra pieces of support blog technology can support academic publishing also. With knowledge blog software, we can add a little extra formality.

Uses

We have now made active use of knowledgeblog for a number of different purposes, as a journal, and for hosting conference publications. The tools and software we have written are also useful for other forms of academic publishing: it is used for my (PWL) open labbook; and, has even been used to web publish an entire thesis.

knowledgeblog has put forward a blog-based academic publication strategy. That is very interesting and attractive. I would like to take part in.

But, it looks it is just on the its beginning. No real case/example there.

One suggestion is:
At the first step, could you please ask someone (big names or not, in any areas) to act as pioneers to practice your publication strategy? You know, most people would like follow examples, that is easier for them than doing without example.

I have not gone through all the ideas of knowledgeblog. And I am not native English speaker. So, sorry for my misunderstandings.

It is true that we are at the beginning, but it’s not true that there is no
real case or example. In fact, knowledgeblog came about as a result of a real
case, which you can see at ontogenesis.knowledgeblog.org. This is a set of
articles written by people who are well known in the their field (ontologies
in this case). Of course, we want to extend this to other areas also, but in
all cases, we are following our own interests — bioinformatics, eScience and
so on. So, we are very much content focused. That said, there is no reason
that knowledgeblog software and process shouldn’t work for other disciplines,
and people are welcome to use the software and the process for this. But for
myself, I don’t want to become a publisher; I do want to publish good science,
straight-forwardly and simply. Knowledgeblog is there to enable this.

Great idea!
I hope you’ll be able to push this forward.
If you’d make an R tag for articles using R, I’d be delighted for you to add it to:http://www.r-bloggers.com/add-your-blog/
To gain more readership.

Hi guys. I really like your initiative. Maybe it would be possible to combine with my bittorrent proposal using cryptographic signing? Blogs are a fine and smooth tool for everyday work, but when publishing results in a more formal way, I think cryptographic signing and decentralized file sharing is a really nice way to do it. It could also be systematically controlled in a decentralized way. Keeping track of authors ( verifying signatures ).

You could use the same signatures for signing reviews – so you get an automatic “communications framework” with privacy ensured by public key cryptography.

Glad you like our idea. I’m not so interested in privacy, as the general idea is for everything to be openly accessible. However, I can see the value of being able to sign things. If you want to discuss this further, please send an email to knowledgeblog@googlegroups.com where it will be easier to discuss things.

Hi, Phil. Just a note to say that paged returns from makeBibliography() have been implemented in citeproc-js. The code has been through a couple of rounds of testing and bugfixing and should (as of a few minutes ago) be fully operational and do what you need. The usage is described in the original issue thread in the BitBucket repo.